On 3rd July, 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 was flying in Iranian airspace, taking civilian passengers from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. It was shot down by two surface-to-air missiles fired by the US warship Vincennes, which was patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. All 290 people on board the flight were killed. 8 years later, the US government paid $61.8 million in compensation to the victims’ families. However, Vice President George Bush later insisted, “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are.”
Some of the facts were recorded in the proceedings of the U.S Naval Institute, as Noam Chomsky later recounted: “David Carlson, who was commander of a nearby vessel, said he couldn’t understand it. He said that they saw this Iranian commercial airliner coming up right in international airspace, and the USS Vincennes focused its high-tech radar system on it and was moving forward to shoot it down.”
The attack on the 655 took place towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. At first, the US government supplied both sides with arms (in the Iran-Contra hearings, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North admitted that the USA had broken the official arms embargo to provide Iran with weapons). As the war went on, the US tilted towards supporting the Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
The shooting down of the Vincennes is just one of many examples of the disregard both for international law and human life shown by successive US governments, both Republican and Democrat, in their attempt to control the oil region. In 2002, the USA declared war on the same Saddam Hussein whom they had been supporting against Iran. As the US wages war on Iran once more, we should remember the victims, past and present, and mobilise against their imperialist wars.
